1. Field
The field of this disclosure relates to printing devices, more particularly to a method and interface that provides a preview of the paper in the device prior to use.
2. Background
Printing devices, including printers, copiers and multi-function peripherals (MFPs) typically have at least one paper tray from which the device retrieves paper for printing. Many large networked printing devices have several paper trays. This can cause inconvenience to users, especially if the user desires to use a specialty paper.
This inconvenience typically results from the user loading specialty paper in one of the paper trays in the device, returning to his or her desk and then not being able to remember or locate the tray in which the specialty paper was loaded. The specialty paper could be letterhead, colored paper or other types.
Current printers and copiers may have small guides that allow the printing device to receive information as to the size and orientation of the paper. However, this does not assist in the situation where the paper is of a standard size but has some other special characteristic. Typically, the user interface presented to the user to print documents includes a specification of the paper size.
Other information is available through user interfaces. Most users are familiar with the ‘print preview’ or similar options in several document creation packages, such as Microsoft® Word®, Excel®, Access®, WordPerfect®, etc. An example of such a feature is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 5,680,629, issued Oct. 21, 1997.
Other methods of previewing print jobs are also possible. For example, one method of showing the user a representation of the printed output is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,963,216, issued Oct. 5, 1999. In this example, the calls to the printer driver are converted to calls to a display driver and the results are shown on a display device viewable by the user. Typically, control of the printing device is done through a user interface with the printer driver, familiar to most users of personal computers. A more detailed discussion of printer drivers and updating and maintaining them is shown in U.S. Pat. 5,580,177, issued Dec. 3, 1996.
Interaction with the printer drivers typically starts with a user interface opening and establishing a window through which the computer user interacts with the driver to provide the output the user desires. Selections such as paper tray, including those with different sized papers, orientation of the printed output on the paper, number of copies, collation options, etc., are provided to the user. However, there is no means to offer the user information about the content of the paper stock. The content refers to the visual characteristics of the paper, such as color, pre-printed information like a letterhead, etc., rather than physical characteristics such as size and orientation.
Therefore, a need exists for a method to provide information about the visual characteristics of the paper in a printing device.
One embodiment of the invention is a method of using a document management application to provide a preview of paper available in a printer. The user would acquire an image of the paper, more than likely from a scanner. The user would then add this scanned image to a library of document images in a document management application. The image scanned image of the paper could then be associated with a particular paper tray on a printer through the document management application. The new information would be used to update the user interface for that printer to allow users to preview the paper in the printer tray(s).